This is no way exonerates the Wuhan government from possible culpability—indeed government officials did deliberately suppress information—but this investigative opinion doesn’t pass scientific muster. Misinformation.
Smallpox is also naturally originating virus. That doesn't prohibit it from leaking from a lab.
Either can be equally believable yet impossible to prove.
Also it refused fiercely to let foreign experts in to investigate, which is also hard to explain other than something MUST be hidden at all costs.
I’m a bioscientist. It’s frustrating to respond with evidence and in good faith, and be downvoted by those who simply disagree. But sadly it appears that the loudest voice prevails over reason.
The bats this disease come from we’re not being sold in the market at this time. They’re out of season. So already the theory is assuming a multi-animal hop (some other wild animal got in contact with a bat and got infected, then captured and moved a thousand kilometers to the wet market and killed).
Meanwhile the bio lab in Wuhan received a sample of infectious coronavirus just months prior to the earliest known case. Within a few weeks of the outbreak while China was still downplaying the disease, the central government passed a rushed emergency safety rules update for these labs, starts pushing back on requests for access, and using state media to throw out a bunch of crazy theories about external origin.
Anyone with half a brain can connect the dots.
> I’m a bioscientist.
And I'm a Bayesian analyst. Surely your position is that it is a coincidence that:
- the virus appeared to originate in Wuhan
- genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus originally found in Rhinolophus affinis
- The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which are more than 900 kilometers away Wuhan
- According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market
- Wuhan is home to two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus
- Within ~280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC). WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purposes. In one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats were captured in Zhejiang province
- one of the researchers described that he was once by attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. In another accident, bats peed on him. He was once thrilled for capturing a bat carrying a live tick
Not conclusive by any means, but I have yet to hear reasoning by which we should exclude the lab-leak theory, besides that the virus evolved naturally, which does not contradict the lab-leak theory whatsoever.
Also, from your article:
> As a team of researchers from the WHO
This WHO? [0][1] Doesn't instill much confidence in me, to be sure.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM
[1] https://www.voanews.com/science-health/coronavirus-outbreak/...
A rational actor would take the opportunity to do this regardless of whether or not the source was known at the time. If it were even a possibility, you would hope they would use the outbreak as a reminder to take containment practices as seriously as possible.
Whether or not to allow foreign investigators is a political decision. Maybe they calculated it would appear as an admission of guilt or incompetence.
Make no mistake, I am super well aware that I lack all the grounding to understand the explanation.
But can you point me in the right direction? The context surrounding what you are saying must be learnable. At least to some level.
There are a lot of bats in Wuhan. There are a lot of bats carrying coronaviruses. Coronaviruses have triggered past epidemics. Ergo, there’s an institute for virology in Wuhan.
Listen starting at 6:30 in the podcast I posted from Nature. There is indeed strong correlation but no causal relationship established.
Except everything I've read indicates the bats carrying the most closely related virus are not in Wuhan, not even close:
> The SARS-CoV-2 virus is most closely related to coronaviruses found in certain populations of horseshoe bats that live about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away in Yunnan province, China. [0]
[0] https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-complicate...
So why would the virus so strongly appear to originate in Wuhan, and not in another city, closer to the bats' native regions? Appears quite statistically unlikely.
Let’s remember this is China we’re talking about. Before you hand wave that away, consider the emphasis that China places on keeping-up-appearances at practically any cost
Google “covid 19 origin evidence”, look for academic publications or scientific journalism that is well-cited & from reputable sources, eg
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01205-5 [2] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-05-09/was-the-cor... [3] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/05/scientis... [4] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/coronavir...
We really need to do better with scientific communication. As scientists we are evaluated too much on our communication with other scientists (ie paper publishing), while communication with the public is not weighed much for career advancement. I wish this structural problem would be discussed more so it can be addressed.
But not all of this is on the scientists. The public must do better. We can’t just blindly trust what a senator says on Fox News for political expedience, or “trust our gut”.
If a bio research lab is accidentally allowing the public to come in contact with anything it is studying, this is something we need to
1. investigate
2. identify
3. prevent
Saying "it's possible this could have happened anyway" is not meaningful. I would prefer we identify how it did happen. If a lab leaked it, this would inform future discussions on what lab practices and research projects have acceptable risk/reward.
Ignoring the possibility this leaked from a lab until you have bulletproof evidence is nonsensical, particularly when investigator access is restricted. This, more than anything, is the point the article is making. Lab containment failures have a well documented history.
And I am not ready to dismiss the theory but I am always open to hearing evidence to exclude the theory.
For example, there were cases as early as December 2019 that did not come from Wuhan. Wuhan was no doubt a key early hotspot.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market...
There has been rigorous scholarship done on this question. I recommend reading it given your interest in the subject.
from the article you linked to:
> Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
You're the one spreading FUD, intentionally misinterpreting the original article and making up a fake argument that "lab leak" hypothesis somehow contradicts "natural origin" and implies that the virus was "designed". (If I understand the article correctly, "purposefully manipulated" means "genetically manipulated", not "gain of function".) Flagged.
Would you say the signatories are being irresponsible or are not qualified to suggest the lab-leak theory is worth investigating?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00599-7
Edit: wanted to highlight that, while the Lancet and other publications have highlighted the mainstream views that “lab leak” is a conspiracy theory, that there is a prominent minority of scientists that disagree: https://undark.org/2021/03/17/lab-leak-science-lost-in-polit...
Chiefly, it says that there is evidence that not only did the virus NOT originate from an animal source in the seafood market, but they suggest that Chinese officials knew that it did NOT originate in the Market, yet they issued statements saying that it did anyway.
Furthermore, the WHO's own team admitted recently that they were simply not equipped to do any kind of forensic investigation of the lab (https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/world-health-organizat...):
> [Dominic Dwyer, a medical virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the WHO team] says that the team didn’t see anything during its visits to suggest a lab accident. “Now, whether we were shown everything? You can never know. The group wasn’t designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice.”
Even if they were appropriately equipped for such an investigation, what's the use when China had blocked their visits until a year later, when they've had ample time to cover any evidence. The whole situation is highly suspicious, from the initial suppression of news reports of the virus, to delaying international lab visits, to the deletion of studies from that Wuhan lab (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13701168/covid-cover-up-china-...).
No.
This isn't deducible from the article YOU linked!
Not having a link to the seafood marketplace in Wuhan != originating from outside Wuhan.
> The paper, written by a large group of Chinese researchers
> Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace.
> the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan—and perhaps elsewhere—before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was discovered in late December.
I read the article, but it only states that the first case from December was not linked to the seafood market ("wet market"), but not that it occurred outside of Wuhan. Did I misread something?
By the way, early on I believed that the virus jumped to humans at the seafood market, which was the prevailing theory at the time, it seemed. But as evidence like the above article came out - noting that many early cases had no link to the seafood market, while still being in Wuhan - it raised suspicions, and lent credence to the lab-leak theory.
> There has been rigorous scholarship done on this question. I recommend reading it given your interest in the subject.
I do, but I'm not convinced. A lot of reporting either relies on appeal to authority ("I'm a PhD, and this couldn't possibly happen, so don't question it"), or is purposely obtuse, confusing lab-leak with lab-synthesized, and by dodging the point, hardly alleviates suspicion.
You must understandably excuse me for being a sceptic. I started wearing masks back in February or March, against the advice of the CDC who was telling me masks increase the rate of spread. At the same time I believed that borders should be closed to limit the rate of spread, while the WHO was telling me that closing borders would do no such thing.
So I am not going to believe something just because an expert tells me to, nor do I find it at all scientific to dismiss politically inconvenient possibilities.
>The Lancet paper’s data also raise questions about the accuracy of the initial information China provided, Lucey says.
If anything, this source strengthens the possibility of lab leak hypothesis.
Then you ought to know that seeing more circumstantial evidence for A than B does not imply that A is more likely. What would imply that A is more likely is if you find more circumstantial evidence for A than whatever amount you would expect to find if A didn't happen.
That's why good Bayesians place so little weight on circumstantial evidence: because it's difficult or impossible to predict the expected amount of circumstantial evidence for something that didn't happen. It would involve answering questions like, "When a novel coronavirus moves from the animal population to humans without a lab accident, what are the odds that it will happen within X miles of a lab studying such viruses?" That's pretty difficult to answer, given that we don't know a lot about how or why that happens yet.
And it shouldn't even need to be said that this all goes double when the thing being argued over is political (because, even if you personally are unbiased, the people gathering and publishing the evidence you rely on may not be) and treble when the evidence is technical and outside your area of expertise.
I think that's true, but it ignores the possibility that the WIV was working with new viruses with unpublished genomes. The WIV routinely organized expeditions to remote bat caves to collect samples. There's naturally some delay between sampling, sequencing, and publishing, no conspiracy required. For example, RaTG13, the closest known animal virus to SARS-CoV-2, was collected by the WIV in 2013 but published only after the start of the pandemic.
The WIV had a private database of viral genomes; but they took it offline in September 2019, they say due to hacking attempts. They haven't brought it back up, and the WHO has declined to ask for a copy.
SARS-CoV-2 certainly could be a naturally-evolved virus first transmitted from an animal to a non-scientist human. It could also be a naturally-evolved virus collected and accidentally released by the WIV, or a recombinant of multiple such viruses, or the descendant of such a virus after serial passaging. Nothing in Andersen's argument distinguishes any of these possibilities.
But don't trust me; check out Marc Lipsitch's Twitter feed today, or David Relman's article:
> Some have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus (3). This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246
This isn't a conspiracy theory, and it's not even a fringe viewpoint anymore. It's just a reasonable step in investigating the yet-unknown origin of what could be the worst industrial accident in human history.
I couldn't find anything on Fox News.
I now think the lab leak hypothesis is worth considering, and regret labeling as a conspiracy theory, although I maintain the characterization that the lab leak hypothesis is frequently found alongside other conspiracy theories.
I also would maintain that the current consensus is that SARS-COV-2 came from natural spillover, and the leak hypothesis is a minority opinion, but one held by credible scientists with well-thought arguments and therefore worth considering. I wish the original article would cite this work.
Connecting dots == You believe because you want to
Unless someone came with causal evidence that someone gets infected from the lab, it is only your belief and there is no way to prove it.
You can believe whatever you like, so do the others.
Recently (3 days ago)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210318185328.h...
Not sure how to square this with the fact you're saying HN collectively gets it wrong. Either you can't even determine what it is they're getting wrong or you're exceptionally good at gauging what the HN opinion is. Because of your quote, I'll assume you're not accurately gauging what HN's majority opinion is on issues, because it's "very hard." I spend a lot of time here and don't think it's difficult at all. While there's a lot of debate and disagreement, most issues have fairly clear >2/3 majorities.
Classically liberal, anti-trumpism, climate change urgently needs addressing, anti-BigTech, static typing, Rust/Go > Java/C#, anti-CCP, anti-surveillance, pro-encryption / pro-privacy, pro-fasting, pro-lifting, decriminalize drug use, pro-rationalist, crypto mostly snake oil, more Twitter use/discussion than IG/Snap/TikTok though it's less popular, etc.
The theory that there must be intermediate hosts is attempting to fit the natural origin theory to the evidence, not the other way around. It is perfectly capable of jumping straight to humans, but there is no way for it to make that jump in Wuhan at that time so therefore it must have come through another species. That’s the logic.
So, except for the fact that you must believe WIV did all these experiments in total secrecy (so that nobody outside heard of it while visiting, etc) and now won't admit to having done them, it's not a conspiracy theory.
And again, RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, was sampled by the WIV in 2013 and published only post-pandemic. So it's unquestionable that they had at least one unpublished virus similar to SARS-CoV-2 in their collection; the only question is how many others.
It's likely that the only people who know the answer are under the physical control of the Chinese government. Even if they're sometimes briefly abroad, they likely have loved ones behind. So it doesn't take any voluntary conspiracy to keep them quiet, just a direction from a government that has amply demonstrated e.g. in Xinjiang its willingness and ability to punish anyone who discloses its secrets.
As I mentioned earlier, a proximal animal host would greatly increase my confidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated from natural zoonosis. Is there any evidence short of a direct admission from the WIV that would decrease yours?
Finally, Marc Lipsitch and David Relman are Harvard epidemiology and Stanford microbiology profs respectively. I'd rather people engaged seriously with the evidence than just relied on credentials; but are you saying they're conspiracy theorists too?
And you are making a claim about them lying, this comes unavoidably from saying that the VIW is the origin of SARS-CoV-2 as the VIW themselves are publicly claiming they have nothing closer than RaTG13.
RaTG13 is the closest virus found in the wild to SARS-CoV-2. Samples of it were shipped to the Wuhan lab, which does so-called "gain of function research"--AKA experimenting with artificially sped up mutation rates. Not very long thereafter, SARS-CoV-2 shows up in the surrounding metropolitan area with a very, very similar genome. They're the nearest siblings on the phylogenetic tree.
It's only politics which keep people from calling this the smoking gun it really is.
>However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.
The fact that covid's features are found in nature seems a weak argument to disprove lab involvement.
On the other hand covid seems well adapted to humans which could have come about by serial passage in a lab. Perhaps they were doing something like in vivo characterisation of spillover risk as mentioned in Daszak's grant application for the WIV?
Or something like:
>We performed in vivo experiments in transgenic (human ACE2 expressing) mice and civets in 2018 and 2019 in the Institute’s biosafety laboratory. The viruses we used were bat SARSr-CoV close to SARS-CoV. (Shi Zhengli)
?
> "Decades" worth of mutations can happen in a single immune-compromised host in a matter of weeks.
SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating for a year now. The number of mutations it has undergone is a tiny fraction of the number of mutations separating RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2.
> fwiw I'd love a source for that "decades" claim.
A paper in Nature Microbiology estimates the most recent common ancestor of RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 to be in the 1960s. The latest possible time of divergence is 2000.[1]
> RaTG13 is the closest virus found in the wild to SARS-CoV-2. Samples of it were shipped to the Wuhan lab, which does so-called "gain of function research"--AKA experimenting with artificially sped up mutation rates.
First of all, gain-of-function does not mean "artificially sped-up mutation rates." It normally refers to specific, targeted changes to the genome, done in order to test a particular hypothesis. What you're describing is a type of experiment never done before: passaging a virus thousands of times in order to generate a massively different virus. This would be an massively time- and labor-intensive experiment, with no apparent motivation.
Second of all, RaTG13 has never been isolated. It exists as fragments of RNA in a fecal swab. Its genome has been reconstructed from sequences of RNA samples, but actually extracting a replicating virus from a fecal swab is a major undertaking. To date, the WIV has only isolated three SARS-related coronaviruses, all of them much closer to the original SARS than to SARS-CoV-2. Before 2020, nobody cared much about viruses that are 20% different from the original SARS. If you read papers from the WIV before 2020, they're all about viruses like WIV-1, which is closely related to the original SARS.
The lab in question was sent tissue samples extracted from the miners who died of RaTG13. These presumably would have live virus on them.
I noted above that the WIV had a database of viral genomes. Public access to that database was removed in September 2019. They say this was due to repeated hacking attempts. They've taken no steps to restore access, or to make the database available in another format (e.g., a dump on a flash drive) that would clearly present zero information security risk. Do you believe their explanation?
And for emphasis, I don't think it's certain that they're lying (about RaTG13 being the closest known relative, at least; I can't see how anyone with the slightest domain knowledge would believe the "hacking" claim), just as I don't think it's certain that a company is lying about their financials when I want to see audited results. The point is that I don't know, and it's normal for people making an important claim to actively want transparency, to build confidence so people don't have to trust them. The WIV's behavior here is the opposite of that.
However, the miners' story shows you why virologists consider natural zoonosis overwhelmingly likely. Miners, people who raise livestock, butchers, and millions of other people throughout China are in close contact with possibly infected animals every day. Spillover events are probably not uncommon: it's estimated that most (about 95%, in the countryside) spillover events of SARS-CoV-2-like viruses do not cause sustained outbreaks.[2] A few people get sick, and then the virus dead-ends. The virus' best chance is if someone who's infected travels to a major population center, where the virus has a higher chance of spreading. The virus' chance of survival is estimated to increase to about 30%, in that case.
1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z
2. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/03/17/scie...
> They had sought wastewater samples from central China to check if the virus could be detected in sewage from late 2019, but were told those had been discarded, per standard policy, after a month, said Dr. Koopmans.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-refuses-to-give-who-raw-d...
So while it's very likely that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in Italy back in October, it's entirely possible (and likely, I believe) that it was circulating yet earlier in Wuhan; but the evidence to confirm or refute was destroyed.
There are a few much more substantive sites with analysis into the genetics and circumstances around the virus, which emerged since the April 2020 which your Nature article cites as its primary source.
Here's a direct debunk of that article: https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/03/19/china-owns-natur...
That author has written a more extensive article with much more information around the lab itself: https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-t...
And here is an analysis of RaTG13, the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2, as a "smoking gun":
https://retractionwatch.com/2021/03/24/paper-claiming-presen...